milieux de mémoire

this evening we had a party in the backyard of my building to celebrate the installation of new bike racks.

suffice it to say, there was free wine and I couldn't resist....so three glasses later I am mildly incapable of completing my readings for tomorrow but fairly capable of writing things on the internet.

we're going to get a little academic here...but you will love it...I promise.

For class yesterday we had to read a text by Pierre Nora, Between Memory and History. It was really beautifully written and traced the shift from the milieux de mémoire, the settings or circles of memory as a real part of everyday experience, to the lieux demémoire, the place of history. Nora is focused on the enormous distance, spurred by the acceleration of history, that separates real memory “the inviolate social memory that primitive and archaic societies embodied” and “history, which is how modern societies organize a past they are condemned to forget because they are driven by change”. For Nora, the point when the state was divorced from the nation is also the moment when history was transformed into social self-understanding. He is interested in these divides, in the estrangement of history from memory, in the distancing we have created between ourselves and our pasts: “we feel a visceral attachment to that which made us what we are, yet at the same time we feel historically estranged from this legacy, which we must now coolly assess”.

Nora has a brilliant quote about the obsession with archiving and preservation:

"The less memory is experienced from within, the greater its need for external props and tangible reminders of that which no longer exists except qua memory--hence the obsession with the archive that marks an age and in which we attempt to preserve not only all of the past but all of the present as well. The fear that everything is on the verge of dissappearing, coupled with anxiety about the precise significance of the present and uncertainty about the future, invests even the humblest testimony, the most modest vestige, with the dignity of being potentially memorable."

Another topic surfaces is the construction of the human through memory, that memories are what makes human beings human. What are we, then, without our memories? The neurologist Oliver Sacks has case studies that explore a deeper redefinition of ‘memory’ for those people who have become unhinged from their pasts, cut off from their present, floating untethered in the world. It would be valuable, I think, to look at the ‘humanizing’ qualities that we have attributed to memory in light of the compulsive externalization, archiving, and documentation of the self.

(dream sweet my little pack rats, photographers, and collectors of beautiful things)

xoxo,

m